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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
James A. Smith, Vivek Agarwal, Ahmad Al Rashdan (INL)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1667-1671
Data analytics should be at the center of strategic maintenance decision making. The diversity and quality of data collected provides key intuition that drives effective decisions on complicated topics. Online condition monitoring is used to reduce time based preventive maintenance and to enable predictive maintenance. Effective interpretation of data leads to information that plant operators can turn into decisions and actions that improve operations and maintenance activities. Data analytics is the primary technique used to facilitate effective data interpretation that will generate revolutionary results. The starting point is the data. Patterns in the data are noted and observed. The patterns observed while the plant is operating under preset conditions define process states. These patterns are mathematically manipulated to highlight changes when process changes are detected. The methods that detect state changes usually rely on correlation algorithms. Statistics are used to determine if the changes in the patterns are real or caused by plant noise and uncertainty levels. Integrated tools are used to implement algorithms that form the data analytics process and automate the decision making. Operations research is necessary to understand the operational context of the data. Machine learning algorithms provide dynamic mathematical means that can understand the present state and predict the next state with a degree of certainty. It is this prediction and the associated prediction certainty that allows plant operators to make effective decisions. This paper will discuss the approach to build a roadmap that will migrate data analytic techniques into production facilities.